The Landauer Principle: Re-Formulation of the Second Thermodynamics Law or a Step to Great Unification?

Edward Bormashenko

doi:10.3390/e21100918

Abstract

The Landauer principle quantifies the thermodynamic cost of the recording/erasure of one bit of information, as it was stated by its author: “information is physical” and it has an energy equivalent. In its narrow sense, the Landauer principle states that the erasure of one bit of information requires a minimum energy cost equal to kBT ln2, where T is the temperature of a thermal reservoir used in the process and is Boltzmann’s constant. The Landauer principle remains highly debatable. It has been argued that, since it is not independent of the second law of thermodynamics, it is either unnecessary or insufficient as an exorcism of Maxwell’s demon. On the other hand, the Landauer principle enables the “informational” reformulation of thermodynamic laws. Thus, the Landauer principle touches the deepest physical roots of thermodynamics. Authors are invited to contribute papers devoted to the meaning, interpretation, physical roots, experimental verification and applications of the Landauer principle. Papers devoted to the quantum and relativity aspects of the Landauer principle are encouraged.

Highlights

Informational theory is usually supplied in a form that is independent of any physical embodiment.In contrast, Rolf Landauer in his papers argued that information is physical and it has an energy equivalent [1,2,3]
We demonstrate the informational re-formulation of thermodynamics [20,21,22,23,24,25], which may be useful as a step for the “great unification” of physics, enabling a new glance on the fundamental physical problems
We demonstrated that the Landauer principle supplies the estimation of the minimal mass of the particle allowing the recording/erasure of information e0 = kB Tln2 within the surrounding medium at temperature T

Summary

Introduction

Informational theory is usually supplied in a form that is independent of any physical embodiment. Rolf Landauer in his papers argued that information is physical and it has an energy equivalent [1,2,3]. It may be stored in physical systems such as books and memory chips and it is transmitted by physical devices exploiting electrical or optical signals [1,2,3]. Tight and simplest meaning, the Landauer principle states that the erasure of one bit of information requires a minimum energy cost equal to kB T ln, where T is the temperature of a thermal reservoir used in the process and k is Boltzmann’s constant [1,2,3,4,8,13]. We demonstrate the informational re-formulation of thermodynamics [20,21,22,23,24,25], which may be useful as a step for the “great unification” of physics, enabling a new glance on the fundamental physical problems

The Landauer Principle and Relativity

The Landauer Principle and the Great Unification of Physics

The Landauer Principle and the Relativistic Transformation of Temperatures

The Landauer Principle and the Dark Matter Problem

The Landauer Principle and the Informational Content of the Universe

Conclusions